Experimental insights on electric discharges as a potential mechanism for self-ignition of mud volcanoes

This data publication provides data from 13 experiments performed in 2022 in the Gas-mixing lab at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Germany). The experiments were conducted to investigate the charging and discharging potential of material collected from a mud volcano from the Salton Sea (GPS-Data 33°12'2.7"N 115°34'41.4"W). The sample material was used in decompression experiments. The material was pressurized with argon gas instead of methane to assure safety conditions while running the experiments in the laboratory. The experimental setup is a modified version first developed by Alidibirov and Dingwell (1996) and further modified by Cimarelli et al. (2014); Gaudin and Cimarelli (2019); Stern et al. (2019) to enable the detection and quantification of discharges caused by the interaction of the discharging particles. The material was ejected from the autoclave into a Faraday cage, that is insulated from the autoclave and discharges going from the jet to the nozzle were recorded by a datalogger. Additionally, the eruption of the decompressed material was recorded by a high-speed camera. In the experiments, the influence of humidity and grain size distribution were tested. The influence of humidity was tested by using the material as wet as collected but also dried and milled and later exposed to varying but controlled humidity conditions. The grain size distribution was tested by mixing the dried and milled mud sample with 10, 50 and 90% of sea sand.